I am organising a book talk and a book symposium to mark the publication of an edited volume (in Korean), which I have been working on since last year. It’s entitled <Anti Gentrification: What is to be done>.

I’ve been nominated as Eminent Scholar by KyungHee University in recognition of my research, and will be visiting Seoul and the university a couple of times this year, once between 20 August and 9 September, and again between 11 October and mid-November. I look forward to many fruitful discussions about Korea/Asia’s speculative urbanisation, gentrification, the right to the city, and social justice, and to imagining alternative urbanism collectively.

Together with Michel Nicolau, who was a visiting fellow in my department with the financial support from the Urban Studies Foundation (International Fellowship), I have written a piece about the Rio Olympic Games, an assessment six months after its closing.

Rio helped to legitimate a discourse that states that in during extraordinary circumstances, it is fair to make huge transfers of wealth from public to private interests, from lower to upper classes, from the poor to the rich.

I have been part of this exciting research group since 2014 as part of the research project “Crisis and Transformation of East Asian Cities in the Age of Globalization” (In Korean: “세계화 시대 , 동아시아 도시의 위기와 전환”) funded by the Social Sciences Korea programme (2014-2017), National Research Foundation of Korea.

The project aims to “provide a more concrete understanding of Cold War developmental urbanization, the SSK Research Project on East Asian Cities attempts to explain the urbanization of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China in terms of three elements that define the character of East Asian urban­ization: compression, exceptionality, and risk.” To see a brief summary of the project in English, click here.

The team’s Korean web site has been revamped recently to include a fuller list of team members and what they do. Click here to visit the staff page and find out their profiles.

So much has been said about Songdo City in recent years in both academic and practitioner circles. International media has also taken part to inflate the reputation of Songdo City, hailed initially as an eco-city, then as a ubiquitous city (or U-city) and now a smart city (Shwayri, 2013; Shin, Park and Sonn, forthcoming; Kim, 2010). The New York Times went even further to dub it “Korea’s High-Tech Utopia” (O’Connell, 2005). Sometimes its own promotional material puts all these together and simply refers to Songdo as an eco-friendly ubiquitous smart city (IFEZ Authority, 2007). Governments elsewhere see Songdo as a reference for their own mega-projects to create a brand new city from the scratch (see El Telégrafo, 2012 for example on the construction of Yachay City in Ecuador). However, Songdo has come to cater exclusively for the needs of domestic and global investors as well as the rich who have financial resources to grab upmarket real estate properties. It may indeed be an urban utopia, built on a reclaimed tabula rasa and promoted by the state, merging together technological innovation, fixed assets investment, real estate speculation and financialisation, for exclusive use of the rich and the powerful.

Urban Salon is an interdisciplinary London-based seminar series that I organise with a few other colleagues (see the web site here: http://theurbansalon.org). As part of the series, I am organising a seminar that examines the experiences of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, juxtaposed with the experiences of Asian mega-events (China, Korea and Japan). More details can be found below and on the above Urban Salon web site:

Cities of Spectacle and Mega-events: Analysing the Symbolic Economy of Mega-events

Thursday 23 February 2017, 18.00 – 20.00
PAR.LG.03, Parish Building, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE (view LSE Maps)

Brazil has recently hosted the two most important so-called mega-events, FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games. As all governments before, Brazilian officials have justified the hosting as an “opportunity” to “promote” Brazilian “image” and enhance its “status” in the global space. The caution quotes indicate that all these terms are taken for granted, without the necessary analysis. Bearing that in mind, the aim of this presentation will be as follows:

1) to understand the condition of production and circulation of images in the mega-events. It will be shown how FIFA and IOC have recently enhanced efforts to control the production and circulation of images and to expand its zone of control, both in terms of physical space and media;
2) to recognise the specificity of the Brazilian experience focusing on the “image” of Brazil the government tried to propose and the kind of symbolic production it implied. It will be shown that this “image” has been thought as a specific kind, dictated by the marketing and branding;
3) to understand the disputes around this “image” and the conditions of this dispute according to the media-space of mega-events.

Discussants are to respond to the above talk, reflecting upon their own research on mega-events in Brazil, China, Korea and Japan.

As part of the forthcoming RC21 conference (11-13 September, Leeds, UK), I am organising, with Matthias Bernt (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space) and Paul Waley (University of Leeds) back-to-back double sessions on gentrification, (1) Gentrification and Statehood and (2) Gentrification as Method. The session details are attached below.

The impact of public policies on the dynamics and patterns of gentrification has received increasing attention throughout the recent years. Yet, while it is generally acknowledged that the different institutional contexts have the potential to significantly “limit, alter, or impede gentrification” (Porter and Shaw 2009), the variegated geography of statehood have remained an under-explored issue in gentrification studies. In contrast with studies on “worlds of welfare capitalism” (Esping-Andersen 1990), on “housing systems” (Kemeny 1995 and 2005) or on “varieties of residential capitalism” (Schwarz and Seabrooke 2008), gentrification studies have been marked by a focus on the local (neighbourhood scale in particular) and hardly examined how different patterns of urban upgrading, redevelopment and displacement interplay with different variants of statehood. Divergent trajectories of institutionalizing property relations, tenure relations, and historico-geographical formulations of social justice concepts across the globe have thus remained out of sight. The shortfall extends to the examination of the role of the state and different constellations of private and public actors in producing gentrification.

This session aims to address this gap and invigorate the study of the relationship between gentrification and statehood. It calls for papers which study how reinvestment and displacement function in different institutional contexts, taking into consideration the political economic contexts that bring together divergent state and non-state actors. Both empirical and theoretical contributions are welcome.

Gentrification is one of the few analytical frameworks in urban studies which ‘provides a critical edge and some theoretical coherence to physical and social change incorporating eviction, displacement, demolition and redevelopment” (Ley and Teo, 2014). Nevertheless, increasingly in recent years, it has also been subject to negation, deemed inapplicable outside the global North. It is sometimes argued that gentrification prohibits the possibility of multiple narratives of displacement and eviction. However, is this discussion an appropriate and justifiable way of advancing our production of knowledge? Instead of becoming ensnared in categorical debates on definitions of gentrification and its conceptualisation across space, the session aims to locate “gentrification as part of multiple urban processes at work” (Shin, Lees and López-Morales, 2016), understanding the working of gentrification and other urban processes from the perspective of relational and hierarchical space. Papers presented to this session are to engage with, or be related to, the following questions:

What does the use of a particular geographical scale mean for gentrification studies?

How does gentrification reconcile itself with other analytical frameworks (e.g. accumulation by dispossession, segregation)?

Where does ‘concept stretch’ come into play with gentrification?

Are we homogenising space to an extreme when discussing issues of displacement, dispossession and accumulation in terms of gentrification?

How do we create a healthier and more productive dialogue between gentrification and non-gentrification researchers, both of whom aim to attain social justice?

How can gentrification researchers best overcome the principal methodological problems they face?

The session calls for papers that address any or several of these questions. Both empirical and theoretical contributions are welcome.

A quick announcement in Korean with regard to the publication of a journal special issue on “Developmentalist Urbanisation and Gentrification” guested edited by myself and published in Korean by the journal Space and Society.

Planetary Gentrification

For the description of urban change processes Gentrification has not only developed to a popular keyword in Berlin. From Sao Paulo to Prague, from Goteborg to Johannesburg, from London to Bombay Gentrification-concepts are used to analyze revaluation and expulsion in urban quarters. Loretta Lees, Ernesto López-Morales, and Hyun Bang Shin recently published a comprehensive book on the globalised nature of gentrification. All authors will be present and look forward to the discussion on “Planetary Gentrification” in Berlin.